Lesson One, Complete
by Jedi Buttercup
Summary: An oddly compelling woman by the name of Nanny McPhee appears on the Summers doorstep in late Season 6. Fixit fic.
1. Lesson One, Complete

**Title**: Lesson One, Complete 

**Author**: Jedi Buttercup

**Rating**: K+

**Disclaimer**: The words are mine; the worlds are not. I claim nothing but the plot.

**Summary**: B:tVS, Nanny McPhee. _An oddly compelling woman by the name of Nanny McPhee appears on the Summers family doorstep_. 700 words.

**Spoilers**: B:tVS late season 6; Nanny McPhee (2005)

**Notes**: Challenge fic. Someone really should have taken better care of the Summers girls that year. And you know Nanny McPhee has some kind of compulsion magic; no one ever questions her in the movie, even when they really, really should!

* * *

Buffy stared at the odd woman who'd suddenly turned up at her door.

"Who are you?" she asked, trying not to stare at the ugly hat, the crooked nose, and the large, hairy moles protruding from the woman's face.

"I am Nanny McPhee," the apparition said, as though that should explain everything.

Buffy blinked. "Did Giles put you up to this?" she asked, puzzled. "I know Dawn's been, uh, acting up a little lately, and-- with Mom gone, and what happened to me-- but she's a little old for a nanny, isn't she?"

"Does she go to bed when she is told?" the woman asked, stepping over the threshold. Buffy backed away a little in surprise, and found herself watching gapemouthed as the woman took the opportunity to squeeze by her entirely and into the house.

"Uh, no?" she blurted. "What with the tree outside the window and everything, I'd actually be surprised if-- hey, really, who sent you here?"

"Does she get up when she is told?" Nanny McPhee asked serenely, sweeping into the living room, her long, high-necked black dress nearly trailing on the ground.

"Sometimes?" Buffy said, following her. "When it's Xander's turn to take her to school, mostly. But look--"

"Does she get dressed when she is told?" The nanny speared Buffy with a look, clutching the head of her cane in both hands.

Buffy sputtered. "I don't think--!"

"Does she listen?" Nanny McPhee continued, over Buffy's objection. "And does she do exactly _as_ she is told?"

"She's a teenage girl going through her rebellious phase, what do _you_ think?" Buffy replied, exasperated. "But I'm not hiring a nanny. Even if I did think she needed one, I don't have the money to pay for it."

"That's quite all right," her unexpected guest assured her. "I'm a government nanny. Now, if you might point me in the direction of my new charge?"

Flabbergasted, Buffy stared at the woman for several more seconds, trying to detect something-- anything-- evil about her. As far as she could tell, however, there was nothing extraordinary about Nanny McPhee on a supernatural level, except possibly the cane she was carrying. And from her accent-- well, if Giles had sent her-- and she'd been able to come into the house-- well, maybe he was feeling bad about the way he'd left them after all? Maybe she should--

Wait, what was she thinking? Buffy shook her head, bewildered. She knew better than to let a complete stranger near her sister without verifying her identity!

The nanny frowned a little at Buffy's resistance, then sighed. "There is something you should understand about the way I work," she declared. "When you need me but do not want me, then I must stay. When you want me but no longer need me, then I have to go. It's rather sad, really, but there it is."

With that, she turned and glided toward the stairs up to Dawn's room.

Flabbergasted and confused, Buffy reached for the nearest axe-- and the nearest cordless extension. She dialed hastily as she climbed the stairs after the woman, hoping she wouldn't do anything else Buffy might have to act on before Giles answered.

Ninety seconds later, she hung up in the middle of Giles' confused spluttering. No matter who she was, anyone that could handle Dawn that deftly was more than welcome there. Buffy lowered the axe with a sigh of relief, leaving Nanny McPhee to her conversation with the moody teenager, and trooped back downstairs.

"Does she go to bed when she's told, honestly," she yawned, then sat down on the couch. She still had patrol to get to that night, but she'd just finished a shift at the Doublemeat Palace and she was so tired--

Moments later, she was out like a light.

She did not see the figure who came back down the stairs moments later, shutting off the house lights as she went, nor the way that figure bowed to the other spirit whose imprint had been left on the couch. But her dreams were lighter than they might have been.

"Lesson one complete," Nanny McPhee said, bending over her secondary charge with a smile.

--


	2. Lessons Relearned

**Title**: Lessons Relearned 

**Author**: Jedi Buttercup

**Rating**: T

**Disclaimer**: The words are mine; the worlds are not. I claim nothing but the plot.

**Summary**: B:tVS, Nanny McPhee. _Spike encounters a familiar face at Buffy's house, and Buffy learns another lesson_. 1700 words.

**Spoilers**: B:tVS late season 6; Nanny McPhee (2005)

**Notes**: Contains dialogue from B:tVS 6.19, "Seeing Red". Unashamed fix-it fic.

* * *

There were very few people the soulless vampire known as Spike remembered from his human life with any degree of respect. William Pratt had been a milksop of a man, hanging about the edges of a crowd of fashionable people far too impressed with their own consequence, hoping they'd toss him a crumb of recognition. He'd lived at home with his mum, surviving off the scraps of his father's inheritance, and spent his days writing terrible poetry to a woman who couldn't have cared less about him if she'd tried. Drusilla had been that boy's savior, his effulgent angel; Spike had drunk power and freedom from her lips and only once looked back.

_Her_, though. Her, he remembered: the woman in black who'd appeared on his mother's doorstep several months after Father's death. The only time in all his young life he'd ever been angry enough to give grief to his mum; Nanny McPhee had promptly straightened him out of it.

A lot of good that had done him in the intervening years. Still, he remembered her, if not fondly, then with a certain degree of still-childish awe. The process of growing up, after she'd knocked the obedience back into him and departed, had convinced him she couldn't possibly have been as knowledgeable and magical as she'd seemed; his reawakening as a vampire, however, had overturned many of his previous assumptions, and left him wondering in retrospect just where the obviously unnatural woman had acquired her powers.

Looked like he might yet get an answer to _that_, if nothing else.

"Nanny McPhee," he said respectfully, a trace of the cultured man he'd once been creeping into his tone as he bowed to the woman seated by the window in Buffy's living room.

...On second thought, it might be better to put off his questions until he knew just what she was here _for_.

"William," she greeted him, in measured, calm tones.

Spike glanced up the stairs toward Dawn's bedroom, then cocked an eyebrow at the woman. She wasn't as ugly as he knew she could appear, but not yet beautiful, either; definitely in the middle of a job, then. "Knew the bit was a little off balance this year. Didn't think she'd got bad enough for _you_ to be called in, though, or I would've done something about it."

"Would you, then?" Nanny McPhee asked, mildly. "It seems to me that you've been neglecting lessons four and five." She had a teacup in her hands of a sudden, and as she waited to see how he reacted to that, she took a small, ladylike sip.

Spike didn't need to ask which lessons she meant; the long-ago days he'd spent under the woman's thumb had made quite an impression, and the last two had been the most difficult for him to learn. 'Does he listen?' she'd asked his mother. 'Does he do exactly as he is told?'

"Vampire, luv," he replied, letting his mouth slide into its familiar smirk. "Comes with the territory."

"That's no excuse for neglecting one's manners," Nanny McPhee chided him, then let her eyes drop to rest upon a particular wooden chest on the other side of the room. "Unless one prefers to be numbered amongst the monsters?" she continued, suggestively.

Spike's eyes narrowed at the implications of the statement. Just how did the woman know the things she knew, anyway? He usually had a lot more trouble convincing former acquaintances that while he might be a vampire, he had no desire to slaughter those he cared for, nor put an end to the world.

...And she'd managed to successfully divert him from his original line of conversation, as well. "_Are_ you here for the nibblet?" he asked, pressing the point, as he went back over what he knew of recent Scooby events in his head. "Or-- you wouldn't have had something to do with Anya's boy coming back to finish the wedding after we all thought he'd done a bunk--?"

She smiled slightly at that, and took another sip of her tea. "A rather creative application of lesson three, if I do say so myself," she said enigmatically.

Lesson three, if he remembered right, consisted of: 'does he get dressed when he is told?' Spike considered that a moment, trying to envisage all the various ways in which that Lesson might apply at a wedding, then shook his head to clear away the distracting images the thought evoked.

"Right," he said slowly, dismissing the issue into the mental compartment labeled 'don't need to know.' Then he glanced up the stairs again. "Buffy at home, then?"

She nodded her head, slowly. "Don't disappoint me, William," she said, then turned back toward the window, dismissing his presence.

"┘Right," he muttered again, then shucked off his leather coat and draped it over the banister at the foot of the stairs. For the conversation he was about to have, he didn't think his most recent Slayer trophy would make an appropriate accessory.

He wasn't sure Buffy would believe him when he told her what he'd been doing at the Magic Shop when Willow caught him via the Geek Trio's spy-camera network. He'd broken in whilst the Whelp and his new wife were off on their post-wedding shagfest, intending to do something-- anything-- to get rid of the emotional pain that had haunted him ever since she'd shaken him off; Buffy'd taken one look at the pile of spell components he'd piled next to her picture and gone incandescent with fury. She'd been too angry to listen, then, and might still be-- but he couldn't just let it go. Let _her_ go. It just wasn't in him to give up without a fight.

He gave Nanny McPhee one more uneasy glance, then ran up the stairs, following the sounds of Buffy's movements to the bathroom.

She was wearing a bathrobe, bending to turn on the water-- but she didn't move with her usual, economical grace; she grimaced as she leaned over, then pressed a hand against her back.

"You hurt?" he asked, all else flying out of his mind in the face of her pain.

She gasped, then turned toward the doorway, anger darkening her beautiful features. "Get out," she spat.

He'd been half-expecting that reaction, but it still stung. "We need to talk," he said firmly, back-pedaling to the script he'd planned.

"I really don't," she parried, eyes flashing daggers in his direction.

"This isn't just about you, as much as you'd like it to be," he insisted.

"You spoke. I listened. You leave," Buffy demanded in reply.

Right. Well, that tack was getting him nowhere. He shunted aside the resentment that had welled up at her attitude, and went right for the heart of what he'd come to say. "I'm sorry," he said, as earnestly as he could. "Not that it matters now. But I needed you to know that."

"Why?" she asked, some of the anger and hurt fading from her face.

"Because I care about you," he replied, hoping that this time, finally, that might matter to her. That she might finally realize it was more than the unhealthy obsession of a non-human creature.

"Then you might want to try the not casting spells on me," she said sharply.

"It wasn't for you," Spike said instantly, relieved at the opening. "I wanted something, anything to make this feeling stop. I just wanted it to stop." Then he paused, calculating her probable reactions to what he intended to say next. "It would have been kinder to kill me, you know," he said, softly.

She turned her face away at that. "I-- couldn't," she said.

He wished he could see her expression. "Why?" he asked, half-hopefully.

"You know why."

"Because you love me?" She had to, no matter how she denied it. Though it seemed odd that she would just come out with that, not after so much denial--

Buffy paused, then drew in a ragged breath and shot him down. "No, I don't," she replied, emphatically. "I could never trust you enough for it to become that."

Frustration burned in Spike's chest, and he opened his mouth to call her a liar, to insist that trust was not necessary for great passion, to demand that she let herself go and not hide the truth from herself, or him, any longer.

But then, without warning, Nanny McPhee's voice echoed in his mind. '_Don't disappoint me_,' she'd said. And before that-- '_Does he listen?_'

Spike paused. He wasn't listening; he had, in fact, tried to dominate the conversation.

'_Does he do exactly as he's told?_' the memory of her voice continued, coolly.

Buffy'd told him to leave, but he hadn't; he'd stayed, and given his chance, would press her into the floor and attempt to persuade her with the passion that had always flared hot between them.

But she was _injured_, and tired, and angry. What good could he possibly expect to come of that?

Abruptly disgusted with himself, he took a deep, unnecessary breath, sucking in his cheeks as he attempted to subdue his ragged emotions, and shook his head. "I'm sorry you feel that way, luv," he said bitterly, then turned and left the room, heavy-hearted.

A thick, choking silence fell behind him as he walked slowly down the stairs. He lingered at the bottom, one hand resting on his coat, then glanced over in Nanny McPhee's direction.

The woman was still ignoring him, looking out the window, but the sight of her made him feel even guiltier than he did already. Unnatural state for a vampire that it was, still, he felt it. He took his hand off the coat, abruptly deciding that he no longer wanted it, and took another step toward the front door.

Then a voice called, troubled, from the top of the stairs.

"Wait," Buffy said, hesitantly. "Spike, I-- I'm sorry. You're right. We need to talk."

Disbelieving, Spike glanced back up the stairs, staring at her for several long seconds before registering that she actually meant it. Then he walked back up, slowly, and followed her to her room.

Below, forgotten, Nanny McPhee smiled, relieved, into her tea.

"Lesson four, complete."

--


End file.
